'Round about the turn of the Last century George Bernard Shaw wrote a play called "Man and Superman" which he called a comedy and a philosophy. The premise of the play was that a wealthy, social revolutionary and confirmed bachelor named Tanner was attempting to run away from a woman he was destined to marry, and was captured by thieves in the desert.

In the desert night, he has a dream which is the third act of the play. In the dream, the characters from Mozart's opera ' Don Giovonni ', come to life or rather come to death - and are placed in Hell.

These two audio files were my attempt to re-create a reasonably good duplication of the 1952 Columbia Masterworks album of that Third act dream, popularly titled "Don Juan In Hell". I believe that actual recording may be available here at archive.org. I made these recordings in 2006 when I could not find that Columbia Masterworks album anywhere! I performed all four characters. (Don't panic. This is not amateur night with a microphone, I was paid to act in shows once upon a time long ago. ) Having listened to the 1952 recording repeatedly over a stretch of 25 years, I'm afraid my rendition of the play is lifted directly from Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Agnes Moorehead, Charles Laughton and Charles Boyer. Their performances were superb, but I found Boyer to be very difficult to understand much of the time and I slowed Don Juan down a bit and took particular care to clear up words and phrases that I couldn't make out owing to his heavy accent.

While I may not agree with all the points made in the piece, the dialog - the concepts and the philosophies packed into this work are nothing short of brilliant. - Mark Pinheiro - November 2010


This audio is part of the collection: Community Audio
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Artist/Composer: Written by G.B. Shaw - Performed by Mark Pinheiro
Keywords: "Don Juan"; Shaw; "Man and Superman"; "Don Juan In Hell"; "Mark Pinheiro"

Creative Commons license: Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0

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Reviewer: drsordfish - - March 13, 2012
Subject: Original LP's
I found the original two LP recordings in my Father's collection but have no turntable to record and upload.

Any ideas?